Insights To Live A Better Life
As we continue living in isolation, the words of Albert Camus in The Plague keep coming back to me. It was published in 1947, yet it captures the mood we are in today so well. I guess plagues and pandemics affect people in the same way, no matter what era we live in. Here are some excerpts and I replace the words ‘plague’ with ‘coronavirus’ and ‘pestilence’ with ‘pandemic’ to make it feel more current:
Continue reading “The coronavirus has covered everything.”
I was recently asked by a friend what tips I had to stay mentally strong during these uncertain times. Here’s what I suggested:
1) I’ve been reading and watching plague-related content! So for example, I read Camus’ The Plague and I recently watched the Korean show Kingdom (historical drama with zombies!). They give me a visceral feeling of much worse situations which makes our current situation look better.
Continue reading “Tips to mentally survive the COVID lockdown”
We’re getting closer and closer to a full country lockdown. That means more TV! There are some great shows to watch. You can start with some of my 2019 recommendations. But if that’s not enough, here are some new shows I’ve liked:
Continue reading “What To Watch When You’re Stuck At Home”
With markets crashing and virus fears escalating, I’m getting lots of questions on my take on the world. So I thought I’d share a short piece I wrote for Macro Hive:
“Public opinion is sacred: no panic, above all no panic”
“There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared”
Those are words from Albert Camus’ classic 1947 novel, The Plague. Frankly, it should be the book of our times. It’s a reminder that something as primitive and ancient as viruses and bacteria can up-end any civilization, no matter how sophisticated. In current times, our dream was an age of exponential technological development, spouted especially by the Silicon-Valley utopianists. But we got the nightmare of an exponentially growing coronavirus instead.
Continue reading “Pandemics And Wars Always Find People Equally Unprepared”
It’s as if we’ve crossed a threshold into a new world. If someone sneezes, you recoil. If someone reaches out their hand, you waver. If someone asks to meet, you hesitate. Wash your hands often. Don’t touch your face. Get a face-mask. Don’t get a face-mask. Welcome to the COVID coronavirus era.
With fears growing of a COVID-19 pandemic, many are now thinking like a doomer, prepper, primitivist, romantic, survivalist, millennialist or catastrophist*. These are all types of people that believe one way or another that civilisation as we know it is coming to an end.
That path has been well-trodden. Many have taken joined or set up communities that would survive such an outcome. Dylan Evans was one such person. In 2006, he quit his job as an academic and sold his house to fund the “Utopia Experiment” – a post-apocalyptic styled community in the Highlands of Scotland. Continue reading “Time to join a survivalist community?”
My head hurts when I think about the Big Bang – the moment when the universe started. How did something come out of nothing? Is there a beginning to time? Is there a multiverse? Well, I didn’t quite get the definitive answers to these questions when I attended a lecture by Professor Andy Parker, the head of Cambridge University’s particle physics department, but I did learn what the Big Bang sounded like!
Continue reading “Want to know how the Big Bang sounded?!”
It’s Valentine’s Day – a time to buy gifts for our loved ones. But we can also think more deeply about our relationships. I’ve being doing that and also asking others who have been in loving relationships for 20,30 or even 50 years. From these conversations, I’ve discovered the 5 golden rules of love!: Continue reading “My 5 Rules Of Love”
In Western society, there is a common narrative around the history of science and religion. It argues that we were on the right track of rationality and science with the classical Greeks like Plato and Socrates. Then we had a long dark ages where superstition and religion dominated. But from around the 1500s we got back on track with the Renaissance with figures like Da Vinci, Galileo and Isaac Newton. Continue reading “The Sins Of Isaac Newton (3 min read)”
Words have been a primal force of humanity for thousands of years. Take the famous line from the bible “In the beginning, there was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (Gospel of John, 1:1).This clearly emphasises the immense power of words.
Continue reading “How We Are Being Fooled By Words (2 min read)”